Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

however is not much different, but even more in focus. In fact, Boyd re-visits his essay,reformulating the same argument, confirming the findings once more, but now employingillustrations from science, engineering and technology, all of which Boyd conceptualizes asself-correcting mechanisms (or systems, or OODA loops indeed). These fields and theillustrations Boyd derived from them, would be much more familiar to the general audience(although Boyd expressly included sections to convince his audience they were actually quiteignorant) than the philosophical essay. Indeed, The Conceptual Spiral must be considered theequivalent of the essay, but now offered in a more easily accessible format, and inappearance less philophical. The themes are familiar too:pervasive uncertainty as prime characteristic of life,the essence of combining analysis with synthesis, marrying induction and deduction,the importance of novelty, mismatches and creativity,and the requirement to combine multiple perspectives to form adequate orientation patterns.The title itself hints at the core argument, which in part can be traced back to the work ofPiaget: survival mandates reveling in a continuous conceptual spiral of induction anddeduction, of creation and destruction.FocusBoyd starts with the familiar move. First he states the prime focus of the presentation:To make evident how science, engineering, and technology influence our ability to interactand cope with an unfolding reality that we are part of, live in, and feed upon 81 .And the answer will come, he suggests, from revisiting and exploring the following keypassage from the ‘Abstract’ 82 :…the theme that weaves its way through this ‘Discourse on Winning and Losing’ is not somuch contained within each of the five sections, per se, that make up this ‘Discourse’, rather,it is the kind of thinking that both lies behind and makes-up its very essence. For theinterested, a careful examination will reveal that the increasingly abstract discussion surfacesa process of reaching across many perspectives; pulling each and every one apart (analysis),all the while intuitively looking for those parts of the disassembled perspectives whichnaturally interconnect with one another to form a higher order, more general elaboration(synthesis) of what is taking place. As a result, the process not only creates the ‘Discourse’but it also represents the key to evolve the tactics, strategies, goals, unifying themes, etc., thatpermit us to actively shape and adapt to the unfolding world we are a part of, live-in, andfeed-upon.The reason for including this section, Boyd says, is ‘it suggests a general way by which wecan deal with the world around us’. It is tempting to see the echo of Piaget in Boyd’s wordswhen he next asserts that he will show that 83 :81 Boyd, The Conceptual Spiral, p.2.82 Ibid, p.4.83 Ibid, p.5.260